Life is easy, living is hard
Readin' Ace Atkins' blues

by Scot Lockman (July 2001)

Nick Travers is: Alabama-born, a former Saint
(of the New Orleans variety, fallen from grace on national television)
with a doctorate from the University of Mississippi and an on-and-off teaching
gig at Tulane. His skin is white and his blood runs thick with the blues;
he courts trouble more frequently than women, and sometimes they're the
same thing. And while he plays the blues, at a joint called JoJo's, he's
much more successful in preserving them against an uncertain future. Travers
is a blues historian by trade, part Peter Guralnick, part Philip Marlowe,
and pretty much unique in a genre of fiction jam-packed with hard-luck
hard-boiled hard cases -- he's the folk historian as private detective
(professions linked by similar job requirements, fueled by cigarettes and
booze), set loose in a world rife with mystery.

So far, those worlds have been confined
to 1998's Crossroad Blues and 2000's Leavin' Trunk Blues,
both written by one Ace Atkins -- the Alabama-born defensive end for the
undefeated 1993 Auburn University football team and, up until a few weeks
ago, a crime reporter for the Tampa Tribune. Atkins began writing
about Travers in 1988, after a family trip to New Orleans put flame to
his high-school mind. He was a blues fan at the time, a condition he attributes
to Muddy Waters' Hard Again, which he heard at the age of 13, but
he didn't know much about their history -- a situation he remedied with
research as he developed the adventures of his New Orleans-based blues
hero. (Who, by the way, isn't that autobiographical; the character is much
closer to a football player-turned-college professor he met at school,
Atkins says.)

Time passed for Atkins, and for Travers,
as time passes for all. Atkins penned two Travers novels before the third
-- Crossroad Blues -- found a publisher, which is where this story
picks up. The novel follows Travers back and forth between New Orleans
and Greenwood, Mississippi, where legendary bluesman Robert Johnson was
murdered in 1938; some say by the hands of a jealous woman, some by the
hands of a jealous man, no one can say with authority. Whatever. One of
Travers' colleagues has disappeared into the hinterlands of Mississippi,
and someone wants to know what happened to him; Travers (somewhat reluctantly)
accepts and proceeds to (quite accidentally) pop the top on one of the
great mysteries of the blues world.

At stake are several lives and, more importantly,
nine previously unknown recordings by Johnson. (The seed for Crossroad
was planted, Atkins says, when he read a throwaway line in a book on Johnson
-- a smattering of words amounting to a rumor of a handful of Johnson recordings
destroyed during a poolroom fight.) The book stinks of the deep South,
of the lonely stretches of road and decaying settlements that refuse to
move into the future; of cotton, corn whiskey and collard greens; and like
Johnson's blues, the world of Crossroad is alive with ghosts, is
always haunted by the possibility of violence or, worse, death. And in
Crossroad, the odds are good that the hellhound's well on your trail;
and if by chance he isn't, there's typically a white somebody eager to
take his place. (White exploitation of black musical history, reduced to
an effective supernatural metaphor; but maybe I'm reading too much into
it.)

Atkins also offers up a rogue's gallery
of supporting characters, all sprung from the fertile musical and social
loins of the area: a 19-year-old thug named Jesse Garon obsessed with,
yes, Elvis; a black albino named Cracker; Pascal Cruz, the devilish white
owner of a New Orleans blues shack not unlike the House of Blues; in flashback,
Robert Johnson, tormented, thirsty, aware of his doom; and, finally, the
identity of Johnson's killer. If the Delta is their dance floor, then the
music Atkins plays is equal parts research and improvisation -- wild flurries
of Johnson arcana, followed by the refrain of Travers' fictional search,
the blend a fast-paced progression prominently featuring loss, love and
a wry sense of humor uncomplicated by big-city living.

Atkins and Travers moved north, to Chicago,
for their next outing, Leavin' Trunk Blues. This time, the story
is that of Ruby Walker -- the Sweet Black Angel of Chicago's South Side
-- serving time for the murder of Billy Lyons, her lover and record producer.
Travers has come north to interview her, to record her story before it
passes beyond the pale, but Walker has one demand before she'll grant his
request -- he has to look into Lyons' murder, see what he can dig up about
it.

What he finds, among other things, is the
rough history of the Chicago blues and the Great Migration of Southern
blacks during the 1940's and 1950's played out on a criminal scale -- betrayals
of early promise, shut-eye compromise made into riches, the rise and fall
of music in the town where it became a major musical force. More specifically,
he finds living (well, mostly) ghosts brought north during the migration,
and the children of those ghosts. Not just Ruby Walker and Billy Lyons,
but Lyons' traditional enemy -- Stagger Lee, pure hate bottled black and
mean, scourge of the South Side, a dog-collared peddler of vice run to
ruin. And his two agents, Butcher Knife Totin' Annie and Fast Fuckin' Fannie
(dust jacket says Fast Lovin', but don't be fooled -- there's a world of
difference between the two), streetwise children enamored of crack and
violence.

You don't have to get all the references
to get the book, but they add a mythic quality to the story that raises
the novel's stakes. Annie and Fannie share common parentage in the song
“Wang Dang Doodle,” and Stagger Lee (or Stacker Lee, or Stagolee, or Staggerlee)
and his legend may be traced back through decades of black folklore, as
can the legend of his rival, Billy Lyons (or Billy the Lion, or Billy the
Liar). The details -- how Stagger Lee killed Billy, or over what -- are
irrelevant in the legend; what's important is the act itself, final, irrevocable,
and made real in Leavin' Trunk. (For the final word on Stagger Lee,
hie thee to Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, if you haven't already.)

There's an underlying logic to the setting
of the two novels. Following their development in the Delta, the blues
followed the black migration from the South, to points northward. Chicago,
chiefly. The blues came of age on Chicago's South Side, where electricity
and Muddy Waters made the form a matter of public record; so if Crossroad
is the story of the Delta blues, then Leavin' Trunk is the second
step in the music's evolution.

Also: Crossroad is lighter, funnier,
set during the fading weeks of a Southern summer. The landscape is more
alive, the people native to it more easy-going, the atmosphere charged
with hints of the supernatural. Leavin' Trunk, by contrast, takes
place during the week leading up to Christmas Eve; Chicago is gray with
cold, hunkered down for the latest in a long series of winters, a slice
of grim reality set down in the Midwest. No room for superstition here,
and the people Travers encounters are more prone to violence, are accustomed
to a different stripe of poverty than their Southern forebears. All of
the characters are very much of their settings; Fannie and Annie in Greenwood
wouldn't fly, nor would Cracker in Chicago. But you get the feeling that
Pascal Cruz, the exploiter of the blues, and Stagger Lee, blues demon made
real, could make it anywhere.

So, in the course of two novels, you get
a load of education (both directly stated and implied) about the birth
of the blues and its first major move from home. Atkins' next novel (he's
working on it now) is set, he says, in Memphis, which he sees as location
for the next major progression in 20th century black music -- the birth
and evolution of Southern soul music. What Travers is poised to find there
is -- forgive the phrase -- a mystery to me. We'll see.